The invention relates to a portable telephone answering device.
In the modern world much of the flow of personal and business information occurs by way of the telephone. From the beginning of its use, one disadvantage of the telephone as a medium of communication has been the inability by the caller to leave a message if the unit which he has telephoned is unattended and the inability by the person at that unit to choose between answering the unit and continuing with some other work without losing all information relating to the call.
One obvious solution to these disadvantages has been telephone recorders, and many types of telephone recording devices are in widespread use. Typically, telephone recorders are designed to connect directly to the telephone line. Directly connected in this fashion they can directly affect the operation of the telephone system; and, thus, recorders of this type must meet specified standards and normally must be installed only by authorized personnel. Other types of telephone recorders have been designed to interact only with the headset of the telephone unit, and not to directly connect to the lines. Such units do not directly affect the telephone system and traditionally have not been subject to close supervision or installation. Such units typically, however, have been designed to be put into use at one location and cannot be readily carried fron one telephone unit to another. The latter is a substantial disadvantage since most individuals in their personal and business life move each day between locations serviced by different telephone units which are themselves not portable. However, these portable devices have been overly complex; and, thus, have been priced necessarily too high to be attractive to many people who could effectively use such devices.
The present invention relates to a unique, relatively simple and advantageous portable telephone answering device which is designed to receive the headset of a telephone unit and to be readily portable from one location to another. The telephone device includes a housing which is adapted to fit over the cradle of a conventional desk telephone and to receive at the same time a conventional telephone headset having a speaker and a microphone. Plungers are mounted for movement with respect to the housing and for engaging the telephone plungers to release and depress the same to "answer" and "hang up" the telephone. An endless loop of a multi-channel recording tape is mounted within the housing to be driven past a multi-channel recording head. Logic circuitry controls the movement of the various elements for causing a message to be recorded on one channel of the loop and to be played following detection of ringing and "answering" of the phone. A tone is also recorded on the loop which preferably includes a metallic splice which can be sensed to indicate that the loop has made one complete revolution.
The splice operates as a reference point to begin recording of a message onto one channel of the multi-channel loop. At the end of the recording or just before the end of the loop, whichever comes first, a tone is placed upon the recording. When thereafter the device is placed in service on the cradle of a telephone unit with the headset thereof in place adjacent a microphone and speaker of the device, it responds to ringing of the unit by operating a motor which causes the plungers to rise so that the unit is "answered". Next, the motor which drives the tape is turned on and the head activated in a play mode to drive the speaker of the device and cause the previously recorded message to be played to the person who has dialed the unit. Typically, the message invites that person to leave a message following the tone.
When the tone has been played, the control logic responds to detecting the tone by shifting the heads so that they then record any audio sounds which are received by the unit subsequent to the tone. Rotation of the loop is also detected, for example by a cam rotation sensor, which produces pulses which can be counted to determine when a complete revolution from the point of initial recording has occurred. When the count indicates that a complete revolution from the location where the tone signal was recorded has taken place, recording is stopped while the motor continues to run until the reference splice is detected, whereupon the tape-drive motor is turned off. A counter is incremented to indicate the number of messages which have been recorded, and the output of that counter utilized to control the channel on which the next message is recorded. In the event that no message is detected following the tone, the counter is not incremented and the channel is used during the next message recording.
The answering device of the present invention can also be used in a playback mode to play back the messages which have been recorded and in an erase mode to erase messages and prepare for recording of new messages.
Other objects and purposes of the invention will become clear from the following detailed description of the drawings.